Ladlad and Parrhesiastic Pedagogy: Unfurling LGBT Politics and Education in the Global South

Abstract

This article examines the political and educational activism of Ladlad, the first lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) political party in the Philippines and the only existing LGBT political party in the world. Founded in 2003, Ladlad fielded candidates for the 2010 national election in the Philippines, amidst seemingly insurmountable institutional and societal barriers. Audaciously visionary and fiercely resilient, Ladlad’s leaders enacted what can be called “parrhesiastic pedagogy,” a juxtaposition of Michel Foucault’s notion of parrhesia and of activism as public pedagogy. Parrhesiastic pedagogy is an oppositional form of teaching by subordinated subjects who assert their freedom to tell truths that challenge hegemonic understandings, in this case regarding non‐normative sexual orientations and gender identities. Ladlad utilized the fearless tactics of scandalous behavior, critical preaching, and provocative dialogue not to alter people’s opinions, but to grapple with self‐reflexive accounts of their contradictions and inconsistencies. Ladlad’s politics and practices also offer new ways of conceptualizing queer of color epistemology from the vantage point of LGBTs from the Global South. They provide insights into LGBT civic engagement with dominant institutions like the federal government, organized religion, and mainstream media, and with a general populace that considers LGBTs as immoral, second‐class citizens. The article’s focus on LGBTs in the Global South serves to caution queer of color scholarship of its potential imperialist slippage if the latter remains embedded within a Global North logic, yet asserts itself as universal and applicable to all racialized and sexual minority others around the world.

Notes

Notes

1. My use of “LGBT” as an umbrella term for LGBT people, instead of the word “queer,” is consistent with Ladlad’s preference. It signifies both the specificity of the various subject positions of its major constituencies as well as the solidarity and collaboration within and across them, as embodied and enacted by Ladlad as a national political party. It is a clear departure from organizations and politics which mobilize “queer” as a term that is putatively inclusive of LGBT people and that signals non‐normative praxis, yet their positions and actions primarily center on gay men and, to some extent, lesbians, with limited, if any, attention at all to bisexual and transgendered people. I am truly inspired by Ladlad for its visionary leadership, audacious courage, and dedicated organizing, and I am especially thankful to Danton Remoto and Germaine Leonin for agreeing to speak with me about Ladlad in 2010.

2. When Ladlad was founded in 2003, its original name was Ang Lunduyan (the center). In 2006, it was changed to Ang Ladlad (the unfurled). On January 5, 2012, the organization announced that it was dropping the article Ang from its name because the term Ladlad has a much wider currency among the general public. In this article, I mostly use Ladlad regardless of the time period to minimize reader confusion and to reflect the current name of the national party‐list organization.

3. An early version of this article was delivered in a presidential session at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in New Orleans, Louisiana. The 2011 AERA meeting theme was “Inciting the Social Imagination: Education Research for the Public Good.” My heartfelt thanks to Cindy Cruz for organizing the session and inviting me to be a part of it. My deepest appreciation to Ed Brockenbrough and Lance T. McCready for moving the presentation and discussion to the printed page with wisdom, patience, and care.

4. Parrhesiastic pedagogy can also take place in the formal contexts of K–12 and higher education, for instance, between a student and a teacher and between a faculty member and a university president. However, this article focuses on dynamics outside of the institutional spaces of schools, colleges, and universities.

5. That Foucault shifted in his thinking is not necessarily erroneous or unexpected. In Archaeology of Knowledge, he signals his vigilant interest to “shift your position according to the questions that are put to you.” He ends the book’s Introduction with the oft‐quoted lines: “I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write” (Foucault, 1969/1989, p. 19). However, Foucault’s shift in direction on the speaking subject is quite significant, given that his anti‐humanist pronouncement on the death of man is considered “the single idea for which Foucault’s philosophy is best known” and is central to much poststructuralist work (Bernauer, , p. 87). To what extent Foucault pursued or would have pursued this line of inquiry on the speaking subject is unknown due to his untimely death on June 25, 1984, seven months after the Berkeley lectures.

6. I use the terms “Global North” and “Global South” to mark, respectively, the wealthy, developed countries that are geographically located in the northern hemisphere and the poorer, developing countries in the southern hemisphere (Reuveny, ). They also signal the contemporary political and economic configuration of global dynamics, in which the dominant G8 countries of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States are all located in the North and have tremendous power and authority over what takes place in the South. I am mindful that not all wealthy, developed countries, like Australia and New Zealand, are located in the North; that there are pockets of abject poverty within the North; and that there are areas of wealth and luxury within the South.

7. My list of authors and books under the rubric of “queer of color scholarship” is by no means comprehensive and exhaustive. It reflects my reading preferences as a student of history and cultural studies. Those of us working under such a rubric may draw from similar and/or different genealogies of queer of color scholars, artists, and activists. The diversification and proliferation of intellectual and political lineages ought to be embraced, in my opinion, to avoid the pitfalls of a monolithic, rigid, and non‐reflexive master narrative of what might be constituted and construed as the canon and genealogy of queer of color scholarship.

8. For instance, in the Introduction of the 2005 Social Text special issue on “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?”, co‐editors David Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz () highlight the “critical mass of scholarship in queer of color critique as well as queer diasporas” because “these two fields have systematically rethought critical race theory (which takes the U.S. nation‐state as its conceptual frame) and postcolonial studies alongside scattered deployments of sexuality” (p. 7). In their formulation, however, both fields are still grounded within the conceptual and methodological grammar of a primarily U.S. or Global North orientation, without fully engaging in what has been and what is going on in the Global South.

9. According to Remoto (), “we formed the group Ang Ladlad, whose name comes from what a young man said ‘the book that helped liberate us all.’ Our members can either be LGBT organizations or individuals, or their heterosexual supporters.”

10. According to a coalition report submitted by the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (), “in the Philippines, most raids on LGBT venues usually take place when there are LGBT‐related events because police see these occasions as an opportunity to extort money and the LGBT persons are denied their rights as accused during detention. In particular, law enforcement officers target gay men, as they frequently remain silent about abuse—often for fear of being ‘outed’ to peers and family members” (p. 10). For instance, in a raid of an all‐male, member‐only bathhouse in Metro Manila in 2010, “everyone was detained while the police bargained for P300,000 bribe money from the establishment and P5,000 from each client” (p. 10).

11. In the official election documents, the two Ladlad transgendered female candidates, Bemz Benedito and Naomi Fontanos, were listed under their legal male names of Bembol Aleeh D. Benedito and Tito Paulo M. Fontanos, respectively.

12. My focus on Danton Remoto as an exemplar of parrhesiastic pedagogy must not be misinterpreted as an effort to minimize the status and contributions of the other Ladlad party‐list candidates. In my review of the local newspaper and social media accounts, Remoto’s professional and personal profile was featured quite prominently, and I was able to interview him in person. These two factors enabled me to have a much better understanding of Remoto in comparison to the other Ladlad leaders.

13. Ladlad’s enactment of parrhesiastic pedagogy coincides with what I consider to be a politics of acceptable respectability, whereby those that exercise it can be considered upstanding and hence tolerable individuals, even though they are LGBTs who, in the eyes of the dominant authorities, are considered immoral and abnormal. That the leading figures of Ladlad are a university professor with a PhD in English and a list of literary accomplishments (Remoto), a Senate staff member with a graduate degree in Sociology (Benedito), and an attorney who works in the federal government (Leonin) clearly demonstrates this politics of acceptable respectability in relation to mainstream standards.

14. Based on census data for 2000, Roman Catholics are 81% and Muslims are 5% of the total population. Other Christian religious groups, such as Evangelicals, Iglesia ni Cristo, Aglipayan, Seventh Day Adventist, United Church of Christ, and Jehovah’s Witness, constitute 9%, while those in the “Others” category make up 5% of the population (National Statistics Office, ).

15. See, Bemz Benedito’s (, April 14) listing of LADLAD Accomplishments (June–December 2010): http://myinsidebemz.multiply.com/journal/item/30/LADLAD_Accomplishments_June‐December_2010

16. In September 2010, the American Educational Research Association convened a research workshop on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer issues in education research in Washington, D.C., and I was one of about two dozen scholars invited to participate. In preparation for the workshop, I provided a memorandum that began with “The state of knowledge of LGBTQ issues is embedded and framed within a ‘Western’ [or Global North] understanding of sexuality, sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. The vast majority of conceptual and empirical research on LGBTQ issues is primarily based on the experiences and representations of White educators, students, and families in the United States, Western Europe, and Australia.” I delineated three consequences for the hegemonic dominance of the Western or Global North framework in LGBTQ research: “(a) It can fail to account for the varying beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of people from non‐Western contexts in regards to sexuality and gender. … (b) The Western view of LGBTQ identities and issues can become colonizing and imperialist to the non‐West when it imposes particular Western concepts, renders them universal, and displaces terms that are more indigenous and germane to local communities. … (c) White LGBTQ persons and experiences become the universal and normalized figures and lenses that constitute LGBTQ research in education.” It is my hope that the forthcoming book from AERA, which is edited and authored by several participants in the research workshop, will seriously attend to the issues that I raised in the written memorandum and workshop discussions.